Read our five tips now, and follow the blog for more details all March long

Choosing and editing compelling images is a crucial step in creating engaging email marketing. In Emma's Brainiac Guide to Images in Email, you'll find five practical tips for making the most of your email's visuals. Follow The Emma Blog all March long for more detailed advice on crafting great images, including real-world examples, expert interview and videos.

Now in Emma, you can test up to three subject lines, and then let us automatically send the winning version to your whole list. With the launch of our latest feature, we're challenging you to a Split Test Showdown to see if you can spot the winning subject line from a few tests we and our customers have tried. Play the game at myemma.com/split-test-showdown.

Spot the new features (& old stand-bys) our customers are using to make great emails

We're pretty excited about our brand new content editor and email template gallery (have ya noticed?), and we're even more excited to see how our customers are using the editor's shiny new features to create stunning email campaigns. I rounded up a few recent examples to show you how folks are communicating in style and getting great results.

If you've been reading here and over on Emma Tech, you know we've been hard at work to make Emma simpler, speedier and better for our customers. We've shared info about our new platform and changes to come, and today, we're delighted to give you a closer look at the features and enhancements you'll find in your account over the next few months.

Emma’s getting upgraded with a faster, more feature-rich platform and a handy API for your developers to use

We've been talking about it for a while, and we're now beginning to roll out our new API — and the new Emma platform to support it.

More about the API

We've discussed the new API a bit previously, but to catch you up to speed, an API is an interface that a developer can use to get other programs talking with Emma. That means you can do things like add audience members and groups, pull response data, search your audience and edit member fields all from outside of Emma. If you follow our tech blog, you've heard Alex talking about our Salesforce integration, which relies heavily on this new API. Needless to say, this opens up many exciting avenues for both you as a customer and for Emma overall.

More about the new platform

Even if you're not a developer, Emma's new platform is going to offer some nice upgrades for everyone, with many more on the way. When your account is migrated to the new platform, you'll immediately see improvements like:

International character support

Multiple test groups

Faster send times

Overall improved performance

And in the coming months, you'll also see some new features being released on this new platform, including automated split testing, signup and survey notifications and social features for campaigns built into your account. All of these features take advantage of our new platform, and many more will follow. Exciting, right? Here's a sneak peek so you can get a better idea of what's to come.

What's happening behind the scenes

To allow you to take advantage of the new system, we'll be migrating all of our customers to this new Emma platform. That's a major undertaking that entails moving all of your data from one system to another, one that has an entirely new structure to make these improvements possible. The new system will allow us to scale in a fast and stable fashion, and that means a more reliable and flexible Emma for everyone. This should be a seamless process for you, as each individual account can be moved in a matter of minutes, and downtime per account should be a fraction of that. Additionally, we'll be doing these moves at non-peak hours to ensure we don't cause any problems for customers. The entire process of moving all accounts will take some time, so we appreciate your patience as we make the big switch for everyone.

Want to be first in line?

We'll be rolling out the new platform to all accounts over the next few weeks. As a side note, you'll only see any new features we release if you're on the new platform, so if you'd like your account to be upgraded sooner rather than later, let us know here.

If you're a developer and would like to stay updated with the latest API news, let us know here.

Our plan to make your experience better, plus a sneak peek at what's to come

If you rely on Emma to communicate with your customers, supporters or colleagues, I'm here to say thanks. We love being your email partner. And we know that relying on Emma means when the system isn't performing, you're losing valuable time and resources.

In the past few weeks, many members of the Emma community have experienced intermittent bouts of page load slowness and delayed mailings. I want to provide a little insight on the problem and share how we're improving overall performance in the short term while moving forward with the implementation of a newly architected system platform that will allow us to scale our service (and add some cool features along the way) without compromising the in-account experience.

What's causing the slowness?

As we add new customers and send and track more mail, our current databases are feeling the effects of the added load. While the system is stable, and all of your data is securely backed up, spikes in volume (usually from very large mailings) are putting a strain on the system, and that affects page loads in Emma and causes mailing delays.

What are you doing to fix it?

We've seen this problem before, and in the past, we've solved performance and speed issues with the build-out of additional databases and a rebalancing of the load. While we have a more long term solution in the works (more on that in a moment), that's exactly how we're going to mitigate the slowness in the short term. Our tech team has just built an additional relief database, which is being tested right now and will take on some of the large processes starting this week.

Will we see more slowness when the new database gets full?

We know we can't continue building new databases every time Emma experiences a growth spurt, so we're also planning for long term expansion. Over the past eight months, our platform developers have been re-architecting a new Emma platform, and by the end of the year we will have moved all of our customer accounts onto this speedier, more robust system. Effortless scaling is just one of the perks of migrating to a newer system, but it's arguably the most important because it affects every Emma user and ensures the speedy account experience that we're dedicated to providing.

What are the other perks of migrating to a new platform?

A shiny new platform means more than just speedy page loads and zippy mailings. See, the new system comes with a versatile API (read more about it on Emma Tech) that empowers our developers and the wider tech community to build integrations and features that will help you make smart marketing decisions and add value to your existing account. Features already in the works for the new system include:

A/B/C split testing of subject lines, from details and send times

Automatic notifications when new subscribers join your audience or complete a survey

In-account posting of your campaign to Facebook and Twitter

Two-way integration with Salesforce

We'll share more details as those features get closer to being released. In the meantime, I'm sorry if Emma's caused some frustration lately, and we all look forward to providing a better experience very soon.